Werner Herzog: Elon Musk’s Martian city is a ‘mistake’ and ‘obscenity’

Elon Musk’s mission is to make humans a multi-planetary species by building an independent city on Mars.

The billionaire tech mogul has said the Starship spacecraft designed by his rocket company, SpaceX, could launch its first flight to Mars as early as 2024. Ultimately, he hopes the rocket will transport people to the Red Planet in droves. Its goal is to build a city of 1 million Martians by 2050.

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog thinks that would be “a mistake”.

“I think Elon Musk stylizes himself as sort of a tech visionary,” Herzog told Inverse. “Because he has to sell his electric cars. Wonderful he does that. He has to sell his reusable rockets. Wonderful that he does.”

But, he added, “I don’t agree with him when he postulates and preaches on the colonization of Mars.”

SpaceX

Humans should “not be like locusts,” Herzog said, but rather “should seek to keep our planet habitable.”

Musk argued that the Earth cannot be habitable forever and that the human species should survive it. If the climate crisis doesn’t make our planet inhospitable to human life, an asteroid impact could easily do it. Even if we are lucky, in a few billion years the swelling sun will boil over Earth’s oceans and eventually expand to completely engulf our planet.

For Musk, colonizing Mars is the first step in escaping this fate. But Herzog told Inverse he was not convinced.

“I have to say this not only to Elon Musk, but to everyone,” he said. “It is obscenity. Thought alone is obscenity.”

He compared the entrepreneur’s plans to the rise and fall of communism and fascism in the 20th century.

“Thank goodness these two gigantic utopias have come to an end,” he said, adding that the same would happen in the Martian town of Musk. “Our century will very quickly put an end to a technological utopia like the colonization of Mars.”

Still, Herzog said he “would love to go [to Mars] with a camera with scientists. “